War Between The
United States And North Korea Is Inevitable
I have been
warning everyone for weeks that a miscalculation or a mistake is going to lead
to a war between the US and North Korea that will result in the use of nuclear
weapons in battle for the first time since 1945.
I promised
myself that I would not watch the Ken Burns series Vietnam. After all, I had
four friends killed there and some friends wounded. A Purple Heart certificate
sits on the wall in my study. I broke the promise to myself. I watched the
first two episode of the series yesterday. I focused on how four U.S. presidents
saw Vietnam. Let me summarize what I saw:
President
Eisenhower: He gave France hundreds of millions of dollars in support to keep
them fighting in Vietnam. At one point, he was financing 80% of France’s costs
to fight the war. France had over 100,000 casualties in Vietnam. President
Eisenhower would not send US troops. He decided that the war was unwinnable.
President
Kennedy: One quote in the show was most telling as follows:
“These
people don’t like us. But if Vietnam falls to the Communists, I will lose the
1964 election.”
At the John
F. Kennedy Library, I purchased a book: Vietnam Had Kennedy Lived. This
is some heavy reading and quite scholarly. The conclusion is that Kennedy would
have stayed in Vietnam until after the 1964 election and then started to wind
down US involvement even if the North Vietnamese won.
President
Johnson: Despite his humble background and education, Johnson’s biographer
Doris Kearns Goodwin described him as a political genius. Johnson believed in
The Domino Theory. In other words, if South Vietnam fell, Thailand, Cambodia,
Malaysia, etc. would follow.
President
Nixon: Alan Greenspan described Nixon as a dark and troubled man with a
brilliant mind. President Nixon was a master of foreign affairs. He too
believed in the Domino Theory.
With Johnson
and Nixon strong believers in the Domino Theory, it was inevitable that Vietnam
would be a long and a bloody war for the USA. North Vietnam won at the cost of some
3.25 million people killed. 20% of their territory is a “no man’s land” due to
land mines and poisonous chemicals. After the Vietnam war ended in 1975, an
additional 50,000 Vietnamese civilians were killed by land mines and unexploded
ordinance.
Let us go to
the present. Everyone thinks that Donald Trump is wild and irresponsible. Even
if Hillary Clinton or Mike Pence were president, a war with North Korea would
be inevitable. It would escalate to a nuclear conflict. The mindset is there as
it was in Vietnam. It will start with some mistake or misunderstanding. It will
quickly escalate into a nuclear exchange because that sort of firepower will be
needed to destroy North Korea’s military capabilities.
Let me
expose some fallacies as follows:
1) Kim Jung Un and his senior management
team are phantoms hiding in heavily-fortified bunkers all the time. Wrong, they
do appear in public. Rest assured that the following countries have “eyes on”
Kim and his management team 24 hours a-day seven days a week:
The US
Japan
South Korea
China
Israel (Due
to fear of North Korea sharing its nuclear technology with Iran.)
The dream of
all these countries would be a stealth drone strike that would kill Kim Jung Un
and his management team. If this happened the country would collapse.
2) Massive nuclear weapons will have to
be employed with casualties in the range of 25 million plus. Nuclear weapons
will be employed to “take out” military targets. My educated guess is one
million casualties.
3) South Korea and Japan will be heavily
damaged. There will be some casualties and damage in South Korea and Japan. China
should be very concerned. When things get really irrational, North Korean nuclear
weapons and poison gas might be used against China.
What will
follow will be a temporary fall in world financial markets with a nasty
recession to follow. Violent protests will erupt all over the world. These
protests will make the Vietnam War protests seem pale in comparison.
